NortuRE Blog

Recently I have visited a website which,  well you guessed it, is a site which reviews cloud-based storage providers. But what is a cloud-based storage anyway?

As you can see above, cloud-based computing is a service which provides users access to remote data/software via the internet. For example, you can create a spreadsheet using Microsoft(r) Excel on your PC and then upload it to the cloud provider, say Google Docs, and when you’re mobile you can always open your favourite web-browser from a public computer or your mobile phone to edit your file straight on the Google Docs without using Excel. Pretty convenient, right?

Of course, you can put all your important documents there as a backup. So if you forgot to bring your important data you can always get it via the internet. Not to mention that big and bulky external drive you used to bring along with you everywhere.

Here are some reasons why a cloud-based computing and storage is preferred today over individual backup solution:

1. Cost, almost every cloud-based storage provides their service free-of-charge. Nothing is cheaper than free! Some charges a fair amount of money per year for features or additional storage space, though.
2. Device and location independent. You can access your data anytime and anywhere as long as you have access to an internet connection. But who doesn’t nowadays?
3. Reliability is improved. The storage devices in a cloud-based service almost always use redundancy, so your data can always be accessed reliably and safely.
4. Maintenance. Why should we? Let them do it.
5. Green solution. A centralised and multi-tenancy properties of cloud-based storage will reduce the energy consumption of individual users, because they can be put into a pool which utilises a common computer hardware system.

With these reasons, I predict that by the next two years (2013) we all would utilise at least one cloud-based solution, might that be the storage service or computing service. We would have access to our documents any time of the day, share them to other people, or even edit them collaboratively.

The site I mentioned above (www.top10cloudstorage.com) offers comparison to currently available cloud-based service providers. It is ranked based on price, performance as well as customer’s satisfaction. The review mainly deals with the features of each providers, connection speed, bonuses (for example free domain for each purchase), etc. Personally I would recommend this website for selecting the best online cloud-based service providers.